A hero is only as good as their villain. After all, heroes are just reactive. Take away the villain and where's the story? If there's no heinous plot to thwart or monster to slay, what would an average day in the life of a Marvel hero even look like? As boring as ours now doubt. Fly to the office job, teleport back, and a night of Netflix.
Not exactly compelling reading unless you're into really dry, dialogue-free, character-driven movies that explore the negative space of an empty life. Deep down and in the face of our protesting about how much we really are rooting for the hero, we all secretly come to Marvel stories for the villain. The better the evil plot, the better the story.
10 Doc Ock: Set The World On Fire
A Grand Master level evil plotter, Doctor Octopus (Doc Ock) takes things to the next level with a series of satellites designed to accelerate Global warming. His end goal? To be remembered by the 1% of the Earth's survivors as the most prolific serial killer in human history.
There are a series of faints in this plot and at various points, it might look like he wants to save the people of Earth and earn a cool Billion for each of his buddies in the Sinister Six. That's just another part of what makes him a Grand Master.
9 Red Skull: Xavier's Brain
Never one for half measures, the Red Skull proved his evil plotter chops earlier this decade by deciding to engage in some genocide. His plot was simple enough: exhume the corpse of Prof. Xavier and steal the important chunks of his brain. A little surgical body horror and the Red Skull has parts of Xavier's brain grafted to his own. With his shiny new Omega level mutant powers, the Red Skull forced a wave of violent riots targeting mutants across the globe.
The next step in his twisted plot was to create a concentration camp in the bones of the island known as Genosha. The prestige of his evil plot however came after his death at the hands of Magneto. The Red Skull, via telepathy, reanimated himself in a new form, The Red Onslaught. Having his power dialed up to ten, he tried to rewrite all of history in favor of Nazis.
8 Superior Iron Man: Extremis App
After the Red Skull's insane attempt to rewrite history, Wanda Maximoff cast an inversion spell. Heroes were caught in the blast, most notably Tony Stark. Good became bad and so it was that Tony Stark devised his very own evil plot. The plan? To make the human race subservient to Tony's massive ego with the use of manipulation.
Creating the Extremis 3.0 app and releasing it for free, Tony gave users the ability to physically alter themselves to their own defined idea of perfection. Doesn't sound too evil until you get to the subscription part of the app: $99 a day. That's right, Tony Stark uses the drug pusher model by giving everyone a free taste of an unattainable state and then demanding cash in exchange for the privilege of chasing the high.
7 The Controller & Braintronics: Virtual Terrorists
Despite both the controller and Braintronics being footnotes in the history of Marvel villains, their team-up resulted in one of the best evil plots. The plot is as simple as it is fiendish: hijack Iron Man's virtual world, the E-scape, and turn gamers into batteries to power-up the Controller & unwitting domestic terrorists. Mass casualties ensue when users of E-scape begin unwittingly destroying their neighborhoods and cities, with their minds experiencing a virtual world and their bodies roaming the real world firing very real weapons. There is a powerful simplicity in exploiting in-game behavior to wreak havoc in the real world.
6 Thanos: Eradicating Half Of All Life
It's a retelling of a story from another decade but Endgame deserves a mention. It's hard to imagine that there's a single soul out there that doesn't know this evil plot by now but to re-cap for the uninitiated... Thanos has a breakdown in functional logic and decides the only way to save the Universe from a resource-based collapse is to use cosmic powers channeled through his Infinity Gauntlet, erasing half of all life. Spoiler alert, he succeeds.
5 Norman Osborn: Becoming The Worst Version Of Himself
It's a long and complicated story but the broad strokes are; Osborn lost his powers and could no longer transform into the Green Goblin. His plan? Use any means necessary to get back to being the Green Goblin. His attempts at using magic failed and so he decided to have hired goons steal the Carnage symbiote so he could bond with it. Being a total wacko, Norman introduced the symbiote to the joys of killing people slowly through torture.
This worked well as a means to gain control of the symbiote and using its power, he ejected nanites from his bloodstream (as stated, it's a complicated story) that prevented him from becoming the Green Goblin. To the dismay of all, he then achieved his goal and became a hybrid psychopath known as the Red Goblin.
4 Doc Ock: Body Jacking
After more failed attempts at killing Spider-Man than you can shake a tentacle at, Doc Ock devised the greatest evil plot of not just the past decade, but the past century. Using a mind transfer, Doc Ock successfully forced his consciousness into the body of Spider-Man while ejecting and imprisoning Spider-Man's consciousness in his own frail and failing body.
Spider-man spent his last days of life gasping for air in Dock Ock's broken down body before essentially getting beaten to death by his own fists. It's all very "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" and it's deeply unsettling to read.
3 The Red Right Hand: Wolverine Goes To Hell
How to deal with a killing machine like Wolverine? Taking a similar move to Doc Ock, a cadre of villains body jack Wolverine, sending his soul to hell and filling his Earthly body with the soul of another. Genius. Not only does this completely remove Wolverine as a threat, but he can be remote piloted like a kill drone. Simple, minimum risk, minimum effort.
2 Age Of Ultron: No More Humans
Plotting to destroy humanity has been Ultron's jam since day one of his creation. More often than not, his plots involve some seriously convoluted methods. It's a bit of a surprise then when his most straight forward plot achieves his goal in short order and ushers in the Age Of Ultron.
Ultron replicates himself until he has the upper hand through sheer numbers. Ultron and his clone army then launch a surprise attack on Earth and effectively sterilize the planet save for a handful of heroes and miscreants.
1 Captain America: Hail Hydra
Under the influence of Red Skull, the entity Kobick rewrote the history of Captain America. In his new history, Hydra recruited him as a child and he then became the greatest sleeper agent of all time.
Captain America orchestrated a series of incidents that drew heroes into space and stranded them there, outside of a shield he had cast around Earth. The heroes on Earth were distracted by an army of villains rampaging through New York and while the chaos reigned, he trapped them in a void of darkness. The President, overwhelmed, handed over authority of all military and federal law enforcement to Captain America. This is how Captain America imposed a totalitarian fascist regime in America, all for Hydra.